Year: 2008

“Ed the Fed” has written to me again. For those who are new to the blog, Ed’s a legend around here as the Microsoft UK Chief Cyber-Security Advisor. We call him “Ed the Fed”, because of his career history at the FBI and other places – which obviously makes him an ideal person to ask…

I’m sure you’ve already got this covered, but just in case you have missed it, we released the update for Internet Explorer overnight to resolve the security glitch that the BBC et al have been getting all frothed up about. If you’ve got automatic updates set up on your own computer, or your school network,…

Every year we run a global competition called the Imagine Cup. It has traditionally been aimed at university students, and each year one team from the UK has made it to the global finals, held in a far-away place (okay, France last year, but Egypt in 2009). This year, entry has been extended to students…

A couple of weeks ago, I set up a small survey to help me start to to understand who’s reading the blog, so that in the future I can try and make sure that I’m writing for the right person. That first poll told me some interesting things (and didn’t contain any big surprises), but…

Yesterday I wrote about the Rose Review of the primary curriculum, and made mention of the BBC’s website headline “Lessons in being happy proposed”, which I linked to the full article. Of all of yesterday’s headlines, the BBC article seemed to be the most combative. Well, no longer. Although the link sends you to the…

I don’t think I’m letting out any secrets when I say that it can be complicated to buy software – there are so many different licensing schemes from so many different suppliers. And so it can sometimes be easy to get tripped up by the process. I know that people are looking for easier answers…

Although it’s officially called the “Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum”, we’ll all call it the Rose Review won’t we? It’s out*, and the media have already started to produce glorious headlines. Whilst The Times goes with a factual “Primary school children ‘should be taught technology, not tradition’”, for some reason the BBC’s headline this…

I was talking to colleagues in the Local Government team the other day, and they were telling me how the focus within local authorities has moved to “cost-saving” as a priority within their decision making. This is partly caused by the need to fill the budget gaps created by the downfall of Icelandic banks. Although…

They’ve been at it again in the TES – being nice about the things we do, and especially about some of the clever things that schools do with some of the technology we’ve created. Brave New World This week, Saturday morning’s post brought me cheer when they wrote about the Innovative Schools programme – the…

Yesterday was a great day – I’d been looking forward to it for a while, because I went to visit the Microsoft Research offices in Cambridge – our European centre for research linked to universities across the whole of Europe. The meeting (for colleagues from UK education team) was hosted by Andrew Herbert who’s Managing…